ILWIS has I believe 200+ distinct operations, quite a number of them are actually containers for a whole bunch of tightly related similar operations. For example MapFilter which is actually a collection several dozen seperate filter operations. So how many operations does ILWIS “realy” contain? I don’t know, it depends, as I have shown above, on how you count; quite a lot I suppose.
Pointology
One of the the things that has gotten a major overhaul in 3.8 is the way of how point maps are drawn. Before 3.8 it was a bit chaotic. You had multiple options there to drawn point maps with very different sets of attributes. For example, the “graph” drawing and the “true-type” drawing. For 3.8 I simplified the whole system and basically there is now only one way to draw points. As a consequence this means that there is only one set of attributes to change and that will work for all points of all types.
Busy
Last week I finally got the go-ahead for something I have been planning to do for some time. It’s not in the 3.8, but a first alpha of it will probably (I hope 🙂 ) not be far behind it. What am I talking about? Well, about Python (the programming language) and ILWIS. The intention is to make a module that extends Python with Geo-functionality based on the ILWIS libaries. First I want to expose the data interface and calculator of ILWIS in some way and maybe after that the rendering of ILWIS maps (not sure about that yet).
Beta 2
The second Beta of ILWIS 3.8 is done and on the download site!
So what can you expect of this Beta? Well, a number of things that were not available in the first beta are now available, such as color composite and some editors. Some new things, things that were not possible in 3.7 have been included. For example Hovmoller diagrams and base maps (see below).
Some things didn’t make it (yet), like the stereo pair and the sample set editor. The stereo pair is for a large part done and a first version will be done this week but I didn’t want to wait for it. The sample set editor is still in the start phase.